How to Connect Employees to Your Company’s Purpose

Connecting your employees to your company’s purpose is the major prerequisite for boosting employee engagement in the workplace. 

According to a Harvard Business study , 90% of organizations that had a clearly defined purpose that resonated with employees saw growth and profits at or above the industry average. 

Over 60% of employees said they were motivated and/or passionate about their work, which was almost twice as much as companies that didn’t have a defined purpose.

Achieving such strong organizational alignment and helping employees understand your company’s mission and vision is not easy. So in this blog, we will cover some of the best practices you can do to connect your entire workforce to the company’s purpose and enable them to live by your core company values. 

1. Define a Clear Purpose That Speaks to Everyone

Defining a clear company purpose that everyone can understand is not easy. 

In his article in Harvard Business Review, Hubert Joly, the former chairman and CEO of Best Buy, explains how a company’s purpose is best found at the intersection of four areas :

• The human needs the company would like to address
• The company’s unique capabilities
• What the company’s employees are passionate about
• How the company can create economic value

Furthermore, he explains that this process should be a collaborative effort and should be co-designed with employees. 

In order for a purpose to become reality, it needs to be “translated” from abstract to practical terms. Remember, individual behaviors add up to the company culture . So it is critical that employees understand how their actions, behaviors, and interactions with other stakeholders can impact the overall company purpose . 

A corporate purpose must speak to everyone, and it should encapsulate how employees at all levels are expected to behave day after day, rather than a bland list of feel-good principles or values ​​that are too general to be useful.

2. Train and enable your managers

As explained by Huber Joly:

One of the most effective ways to ensure culture permeates an organization at all levels is to role model the expected mindset and behavior, starting at the very top. 

Employers therefore need to invest in training their managers, helping them understand and connect to the company’s purpose so that they can effectively enable their teams. 

Because managers play a critical role in connecting employers to your company’s purpose, they should be checking in with employees regularly, connect their daily tasks to the company’s mission, give them positive and constructive negative feedback, and recognize them for activities that align with the company’s core values.  

One of the best ways managers can connect their employees to the company’s purpose is by giving real-life examples. Communicating purpose while pairing it with a recent example of its success in practice is a great way to help employees understand what the company stands for. For example, they could be spotlighting employees who had extended extraordinary customer care. This way, the vision gets cemented in the culture because people could associate it with these specific examples.

3. Incorporate Your Company’s Purpose Into Employee Onboarding

Building a great employee experience starts with onboarding. 

So it’s important that you connect new hires with the company’s purpose right at the beginning of their employee journey in your organization. 

You should design the onboarding activities, content, and feedback to reflect and reinforce your company’s core values, objectives, and strategies. 

Internal storytelling is a great way to do that! For example, you can use stories, case studies, and testimonials to illustrate how your company’s mission and vision translate into action and impact. 

You can also use quizzes, surveys, and assignments to assess how well the new hires understand and align with your company’s purpose or you can measure the level of engagement with internal content relevant to your company’s purpose.

4. Help Employees Develop a Sense of Belonging 

According to APA’s 2023 Work in America workforce survey, 94% of respondents reported that it’s somewhat or very important to them that their workplace be somewhere they feel they belong.

However, 30% of respondents reported their workplace doesn’t support them because of their identity, and 20% somewhat or strongly disagreed with the statement ‘When I’m at work, I feel like I belong.”

When employees have a sense of belonging in the workplace, they are much more likely to connect to your organization’s purpose and care about achieving great results. 

To ensure employees have a sense of belonging in the workplace, companies must develop diverse and inclusive workplaces. So internal communications departments should put efforts into optimizing their DEI communications strategy.

💡 Related: How to Measure DEI Success [Metrics & Best Practices]

5. Tie Your Recognition Program to the Core Company Values

According to research, 39% of employees said they could clearly see the value they create. Just one in three, or 34%, thought they were strongly contributing to their company’s success.

These numbers are concerning because when there is no sense of purpose, employee morale and motivation are low.

One of the best ways to help employees connect to your company’s purpose and understand their contribution to it is by launching a formal employee recognition program tied to the core company values. 

By creating a formal recognition program centered around your mission and values, you can show employees that your company is genuinely committed to them and reward people for following that mission. 

Recognition programs that publicly and explicitly connect rewards to your mission and values show every employee what they should be striving for, and what rewards await them when they go above and beyond. 

For example, if one of your organization’s core values is to share knowledge, you could have a recognition program spotlighting those who demonstrate such behavior daily. 

6. Launch Engaging Internal Campaigns

Internal communications departments play a critical role in connecting the entire workforce to the company’s purpose, mission, and vision. 

Creative, engaging, personalized, and interactive internal campaigns and storytelling are important for catching employees’ attention and encouraging them to consume content and information related to your company’s purpose.

One of the best ways to communicate your organization’s mission and vision is to use stories and examples that illustrate them in action. Stories and examples can make your mission and vision more concrete, relevant, and memorable for your employees. 

For example, you could have a monthly internal newsletter that spotlights an employee-generated article about how they live by the company’s core values. 

You can introduce a quarterly internal podcast hosted by your CEO reinforcing the purpose and allowing employees to ask questions. 

Furthermore, you can launch interactive activities, discussions on your intranet’s news feed, games, quizzes, surveys, or simulations that allow your new employees to explore, apply, and evaluate your mission and vision. 

These methods can also help you assess your new employees’ understanding, expectations, and needs and tailor your orientation accordingly. By using interactive and inclusive methods, you can foster a culture of learning, collaboration, and diversity in your organization.

7. Allow Employees to Become Your Brand Ambassadors

Employees who are connected to your company’s purpose can also be your biggest brand ambassadors. Employee advocacy is a powerful way to transfer your company’s purpose to a bigger audience, boost your organization’s brand awareness, and improve its employer brand. 

However, many companies still don’t provide an easy way for employees to share internal stories with their own networks. 

With Haiilo, your employees can, with just a few clicks, share internal content and posts from the company’s news feed on their own social media profiles.

8. Measure the Impact of Your Internal Marketing

So how can you measure and understand to what extent your employees understand, align with, and connect to your company’s purpose?

One proven method for capturing such data is employee surveys. However, a one-dimensional semi-annual questionnaire used in many companies won’t give you enough valuable insights . Instead, there should be feedback opportunities at each of the important moments of the employee journey. In other words, you should be capturing feedback about every piece of content and information about your company’s mission, vision, and purpose. 

With the help of continuous employee listening, every company or communication department can tap into quantitative data from communication practices and collect qualitative metrics such as comprehension rates.